Poems by William Carney

Beaches

BeachesAn Environment of PoemsBeachesis William Carney’s first book of poems, compiled just out of college, as he walked along the sands of North Carolina’s Outer Banks and the white marble cobbles of the Greek island of Paros in the Aegean. Here are the poet’s first lyric steps,
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. . . small poems spawned and polished from long immersion in
the natural world—–and in his own developing consciousness. Form-conscious and
honed down, these lyrics each nonetheless begin to interact to create a single
coherent ‘environment of poems,’ foreshadowing the epic impulse that manifests in later
works like Cities and Mountain. Even here, the long and jazzy poem
‘Gulls’ begins tentatively to test those heights.Close